If you can’t get your relationships right, the business won’t flow. And most of us wrestle with getting the relationship comfortable and then productive…
People at Wilkinson Group are familiar with the mantra, Care-Listen-Create-Delight (linked), which in our experience is an almost certain path to positive relationships.
But if that’s too esoteric, try this.
‘First: Enter the conversation already taking place in their minds’
This is a universal law of good communication, at home, at play, at work. We need to know ‘Where the other person is coming from’.
In the mass media we also renamed it ‘Playing to people’s prejudices’. It works for n/papers like The Daily Tele or Herald Sun with what’s left of their mass audience. It’s also what ‘ACA’ and ‘60 Mins’ pursued, where I worked for 21 years.
But at a person-to-person (and much less cynical and exploitative) level, we need to listen carefully – ‘Walk a mile in the other person’s shoes’ – to try and deeply understand our new friend’s perspective on life; history, politics, prejudices, work pressures, what’s happening at home, etc.. Empathy. If we do it well, we are able to contextualise any problem now being articulated. For instance, if a marketing exec is having personal difficulty with a CEO, the advice will need to be skewed to favour that. If the problem is ‘not enough hours’, the advice will be different.
But it alone is not enough.
‘Second: Create a fresh idea’
This is the second part of Care-Listen-Create-Delight. This distinguishes innovators. It also distinguishes great communicators. So we are not just tapping into ‘…the conversation already taking place…’, but adding a brand new thought. In doing so, we create new ideas to make the unpalatable, palatable; the uninteresting, interesting; the objectionable, appealing; or the hard slog, worth doing
For instance, a great leader does more than play to people’s prejudices. Think of the great orators, Churchill, JFKennedy, Martin Luther King, and closer to home Whitlam, Hawke, Keating? And conversely think of those that play to people’s prejudices without the ‘fresh idea’. What about our recent crop of leaders? Into which camp do they fall?
The two rules apply to almost everything we do in comms; with staff, with customers, with the public, with journalists. Yep, when creating a press release to cynical, over-worked journos do we simply ‘….enter the conversation already taking place…..’? No, that’s not enough because every PR bod does that. We also have to find that fresh idea and make the pitch interesting, humorous or quirky. So we first work really hard at the headline, then the first para, then the first quote. One of my colleagues claims he drafts up to 25 headlines and a team chooses the best.
Now translate that into reaching the people we want to influence: our clients, corporates pitching to government, companies pitching to consumers, etc..
